Free software is software that offers a compute user the freedom to study, modify and redistribute it. Free software is considered the foundation of a learning society, whose purpose is to share experience and knowledge with other computer users and programmers. The free software movement was founded by world famous programmer Richard Stallman in 1983. At that time the computer scientist initiated a GNU project. 2 years later Stallman launched the Free Software Foundation.
One of the main missions of this Foundation is the educating on behalf of programmers from every corner of the globe. Millions of people from the whole world give preference to free software which they install on their computers.
Year after year free software developers gather a great number of copyright assignments from individuals and corporations who work on free software.
Free Software Foundation records the collected copyrights together with US copyright office and issue the license, which enables the users to distribute the software in question. This process guarantees that free software distributors work in compliance with the main obligations to convey freedom to other users, and to share, modify and study the code. This work is possible thanks to free software licensing and Compliance Laboratory. The GNU General Public License, being the most popular free software license in the world is published by FSF. The main object of the world recognized license is the conserving and promoting software freedom. Other licenses, published by Free Software Foundation are the GNU Lesser General Public License, the GNU Free Document License, the GNU Affero General Public License and the GNU Free Document License.
The Foundation supports the freedom of software, being against proprietary software. It is also presents significant resources to the public that include the FSF/Unesco free software directory.
